Upstairs in the kitchen, Elin did not wait for the men or the magistrate to debate her question. She lifted the heavy stoneware soup tureen off the side dresser, wiped the oak table dry with a linen clout, and laid out the largest sheet of unruled rag vellum from Lady Signe Lorr’s court portfolio, weighting its four corners with the salt cellar, the pepper mill, the brass inkstand, and Alden Bram’s unbroken iron brace.
Jon stood at the corner of the table, his hands resting on the warm wood while his mind turned Elin’s words over with the slow, wrenching shock of a man asked to saw through the main ridge-beam of his own grandfather’s house.
“Sell the River Lantern,” Jon said quietly, looking around the smoke-darkened rafters of the kitchen where his mother had hung dried sage bunches and where eight-year-old Nell’s growth notches were nicked into the pantry doorpost from three feet high up to four-foot-two. “My grandfather built the upper timber frame over the old basalt cellar with his own adze, El. My father died of river-ague three winters after the ice-jam trying to pay down that bank note so Nell would have a debt-free roof when she grew up.”
